Electronic display screens are becoming prevalent in public places, and are widely used for advertising. Some display systems try to heighten viewer engagement by interactivity of various sorts.
Frederik Pohl's 1952 science fiction novel The Space Merchants foreshadowed interactive electronic advertising. A character complains that every time he turned to look out the window of an airplane, “wham: a . . . Taunton ad for some crummy product opaques the window and one of their nagging, stupid jingles drills into your ear.”
Fifty years later, in the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise tries to unobtrusively walk through a mall, only to be repeatedly identified and hailed by name, by electronic billboards.
Published patent application WO 2007/120686 by Quividi discloses electronic billboards equipped with camera systems that sense viewers and estimate their ages and genders. Ads can be targeted in accordance with the sensed data, and audience measurement information can be compiled.
TruMedia markets related automated audience measurement technology, used in connection with electronic billboards and store displays. A sign can present an ad for perfume if it detects a woman, and an ad for menswear it if detects a man.
Mobile Trak, Inc. offers a SmarTrak module for roadside signage, which monitors stray local oscillator emissions from passing cars, and thereby discerns the radio stations to which they are tuned. Again, this information can be used for demographic profiling and ad targeting.
BluScreen is an auction-based framework for presenting advertising on electronic signage. The system senses Bluetooth transmissions from nearby viewers who allow profile data from their cell phones to be publicly accessed. BluScreen passes this profile data to advertisers, who then bid for the opportunity to present ads to the identified viewers.
The French institute INRIA has developed an opt-in system in which an electronic public display board senses mobile phone numbers of passersby (by Bluetooth), and sends them brief messages or content (e.g., ringtones, videos, discount vouchers). The content can be customized in accordance with user profile information shared from the mobile phones. See, e.g., US patent publication 20090047899.
BlueFire offers several interactive signage technologies, using SMS messaging or Bluetooth. One invites observers to vote in a poll, e.g., who will win this weekend's game? Once the observer is thus-engaged, an advertiser can respond electronically with coupons, content, etc., sent to the observer's cell phone.
A marketing campaign by Ogilvy fosters user engagement with electronic signage through use of rewards. A sign invites viewers to enter a contest by sending an SMS message to a specified address. The system responds with a question, which—if the viewer responds with the correct answer—causes the sign to present a congratulatory fireworks display, and enters the viewer in a drawing for a car.
Certain embodiments of the present technology employ digital watermarking. Digital watermarking (a form of steganography) is the science of encoding physical and electronic objects with plural-bit digital data, in such a manner that the data is essentially hidden from human perception, yet can be recovered by computer analysis. In electronic objects (e.g., digital audio or imagery—including video), the data may be encoded as slight variations in sample values (e.g., luminance, chrominance, audio amplitude). Or, if the object is represented in a so-called orthogonal domain (also termed “non-perceptual,” e.g., MPEG, DCT, wavelet, etc.), the data may be encoded as slight variations in quantization or coefficient values. The present assignee's U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,122,403, 6,590,996, 6,912,295 and 7,027,614, and application Ser. No. 12/337,029 (filed Dec. 17, 2008) are illustrative of certain watermarking technologies.
Watermarking can be used to imperceptibly tag content with persistent digital identifiers, and finds myriad uses. Some are in the realm of device control—e.g., conveying data signaling how a receiving device should handle the content with which the watermark is conveyed. Others encode data associating content with a store of related data. For example, a photograph published on the web may encode a watermark payload identifying a particular record in an online database. That database record, in turn, may contain a link to the photographer's web site. U.S. Pat. No. 6,947,571 details a number of such “connected-content” applications and techniques.
Digital watermarking systems typically have two primary components: an encoder that embeds the watermark in a host media signal, and a decoder that detects and reads the embedded watermark from the encoded signal. The encoder embeds a watermark by subtly altering the host media signal. The payload of the watermark can be any number of bits; 32 or 128 are popular payload sizes, although greater or lesser values can be used (much greater in the case of video—if plural frames are used). The reading component analyzes a suspect signal to detect whether a watermark is present. (The suspect signal may be image data captured, e.g., by a cell phone camera.) If a watermark signal is detected, the reader typically proceeds to extract the encoded information from the watermark.
One popular form of watermarking redundantly embeds the payload data across host imagery, in tiled fashion. Each tile conveys the entire payload, permitting a reader to extract the payload even if only an excerpt of the encoded image is captured.
In accordance with one aspect of the present technology, different digital watermark messages are “narrowcast” to each of plural different observers of an electronic sign. In one arrangement, the location of each observer relative to the sign is determined. Watermarks are then geometrically designed for the different observers, in accordance with their respective viewpoints. For example, the watermark tiles can be pre-distorted to compensate for distortion introduced by each observer's viewing perspective. The payloads of the various watermarks can be tailored in accordance with sensed demographics about the respective observers (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity). Imagery encoded with such thus-arranged watermark signals is then presented on the sign.
Due to the different geometries of the different watermarks, different observers detect different watermark payloads. Thus, a teen boy in the right-foreground of the sign's viewing area may receive one payload, and an adult man in the left-background of the sign's viewing area may receive a different payload. The former may be an electronic coupon entitling the teen to a dollar off a Vanilla Frappuccino drink at the Starbucks down the mall; the latter may be an electronic coupon for a free New York Times at the same store. As different people enter and leave the viewing area, different watermarks can be respectively added to and removed from the displayed sign content.
The locations of the respective observers can be detected straightforwardly by a camera associated with the electronic sign. In other embodiments, determination of location can proceed by reference to data provided from an observer's cell phone, e.g., the shape of the sign as captured by the cell phone camera, or location data provided by a GPS or other position-determining system associated with the cell phone.
Current watermark detectors excel at recovering watermarks even from severely distorted content. Accordingly, the detector in a viewer's cell phone may detect a watermark not tailored for that viewer's position. The preferred watermark detector outputs one or more parameters characterizing attributes of the detected watermark (e.g., rotation, scale, bit error rate, etc.). The detection software may be arranged to provide different responses, depending on these parameters. For example, if the scale is outside a desired range, and the bit error rate is higher than normal, the cell phone can deduce that the watermark was tailored for a different observer, and can provide a default response rather than the particular response indicated by the watermark's payload. E.g., instead of a coupon for a dollar off a Vanilla Frapppuccino drink, the default response may be a coupon for fifty cents off any Starbucks purchase.
In other embodiments, different responses are provided to different viewers without geometrically tailoring different watermarks. Instead, all viewers detect the same watermark data. However, due to different profile data associated with different viewers, the viewer devices respond differently.
For example, software on each user device may send data from the detected watermark payload to a remote server, together with data indicating the age and/or gender of the device owner. The remote server can return different responses, accordingly. To the teen boy, the server may issue a coupon for free popcorn at the nearby movie theater. To the adult man, the server may issue a coupon for half-off a companion's theater admission.
In a related example, different watermarks are successively presented in different frames of a video presentation on the display screen. Each watermark payload includes a few or several bits indicating the audience demographic or context to which it is targeted (e.g., by gender, age, ethnicity, home zip code, education, political or other orientation, social network membership, etc.). User devices examine the different watermark signals, but take action only when a watermark corresponding to demographic data associated with a user of that device is detected (e.g., stored in a local or remote user profile dataset).
In still a further arrangement, different frames of watermark data are tailored for different demographic groups of viewers in accordance with a time-multiplexed standard—synchronized to a reference clock. The first frame in a cycle of, e.g., 30 frames, may be targeted to teen boys. The second may be targeted to teen girls, etc. Each receiving cell phone knows the demographic of the owner and, by consulting the cell phone's time base, can identify the frame of watermark intended for such a person. The cycle may repeat every second, or other interval.
In another arrangement, the multiplexing of different watermarks across the visual screen channel can be accomplished by using different image frequency bands to convey different watermark payloads to different viewers.
Some embodiments of the present technology make no use of digital watermarks. Yet differently-located viewers can nonetheless obtain different responses to electronic signage.
In one such arrangement, the locations of observers are determined, together with their respective demographics, as above. The sign system then determines what responses are appropriate to the differently-located viewers, and stores corresponding data in an online repository (database server). For the teen boy in the right foreground of an electronic sign for the Gap store, the system may store a coupon for a free trial size bottle of cologne. For the middle aged woman in the center background, the stored response may be a five dollar Gap gift certificate.
When an observer's cell phone captures an image of the sign, data related to the captured imagery is transmitted to a computer associated with the sign. Analysis software, e.g., at that computer, determines—from the size of the depicted sign, and the length ratio between two of its sides (or other geometrical analysis), the viewer's position. With this information the computer retrieves corresponding response information stored by the sign, and returns it back to the observer. The teen gets the cologne, the woman gets the gift certificate.
The foregoing and other features and advantages of the present technology will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.